mrrrgn

I'm trying to figure out what you mean by "white supremacy" because you use it so often it seems like something nebulous.

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So it seems that "white supremacy" is a catchall term for anything that argues a biological basis for group differences. Thank you for the links and for not just being aghast that I didn't know this. :]

> Are you implying that the Googlers involved are doing this to advance themselves?

I'm stating the obvious fact that former Googlers have made themselves notable by engaging in public activism while at the company. Both conservative and liberal. If one dreams of becoming an activist and one happens to work at Google there are footsteps to follow in.

Insofar as personal advancement goes. While there are exceptions, it should be fair to expect that what one does at work may be somehow related to personal advancement. This can be advancement in terms of getting promotions, growing skills, or establishing a reputation.

Wholly selfless people aren't the norm in corporate work environments. That's fine. You can be a good person and not wholly selfless.

This sounds exactly like the kind of thing that people who have various other religious conversions say. They have this profound ineffable moral "awakening" and then see fit to start integrating it into every aspect of their lives up to and including trying to "awaken" other people. It's very disturbing to see people go through this process in my opinion as it's a stark reminder that even the most intelligent and thoughtful human beings can essentially have their minds hijacked. It makes me wonder if and when I'll have my mind hijacked, or if it already is (people who have been pwned this way surely don't realize it).

At this point it's looking like the potential to kickstart a professional "activism" career is becoming a fringe benefit at Google. Given that, it's probably best to protest things that will win the attention of mainstream [non-tech] audiences so as to position oneself for the maximum possible upside.

I absolutely don't disagree with you. Personality traits and aptitudes are strongly inherited, along with some genetic randomness and some environmental conditioning. What I don't like is full on genetic determinism. Human beings transmit both genes AND memes for a reason. As sentient beings we inhabit two universes. The one made of atoms and the one made of thought and ideas.

Compare, say, humans and ants.

Ants seem to have a ROM of sorts: software embedded in genes and immutable within a single organism's lifetime. They only inhabit the world of atoms.

Humans have a ROM to cover basic functions but also writable memory. We can change our behaviors within a single lifetime and then if that wasn't cool enough we can also TRANSMIT those behaviors without genes via the world of thought and ideas (language).

We ought to never forget that. Fatalism binds us too strongly to the physical world. It's a bad path that leads to nihilism (struggle against nature is futile), cruelty (everyone deserves their lot in life since if they were capable of more they would have achieved it), and despair (self-actualization is impossible, I am an automaton).

While I think on the whole our society is very biased toward a Boasian view of nature versus nurture: "give me a child and I can raise it to have any personality and aptitudes via deliberate rearing techniques." I'm skeptical of some of the conclusions being drawn from this study.

Environment has not been entirely separated out here it seems. And while a comparison of fraternal and identical twins detangles things somewhat it doesn't completely.

My intuition is that a person's personality and aptitudes (around 50% heritable according to many studies) can help them to take advantage of their environment in certain ways. So it's not that environment doesn't matter at all. It's just that people with varying attributes will leverage their environment in different ways, leading to different outcomes.

It would be even more interesting to me to see the personality profiles of the children compared against their future earnings. My guess is there would be a strong correlation since personality -> interests -> career choices.

Then it would just so happen that identical twins have similar personalities. Leading to the results we see here.

Admittedly I'm hopeful that if we could figure out the correlation between personality and environment maybe we could shift our focus away from the unhealthy extremes of 100% nurture (leads to children being pushed by their parents to fit into a mold that may not suit them) and 100% nature (genetic fatalism leads to apathy and hopelessness). Instead what if we took a child's natural gifts and personality profile into account and tailored their environment to maximize their potential within those constraints? Seems like a more hopeful and useful path.

> Fascinating to see such clear ramifications of allowing religious beliefs to creep into the outcome of successful product expansion.

Dicks sporting goods recently took a stand against firearms that raised the ire of some of its customer base. Tons of companies go out of their way to support political messages all the time. I'd say taking moral/political positions is very much a normal tactic these days in the business world.

Time will tell how it pans out, but my guess is that it isn't some sort of disaster. Most people seem apathetic to such messaging and for every person who decides to buy a chicken sandwich from Popeye's instead of Chik-fil-a in order to "fight hate" there will probably be another one or two who go out of their way to eat Chik-fil-a in order to "stick it to the man" or whatever.

I'm just curious when this phenomenon started. Has it always existed? It seems like a straightforward tactic for building brand loyalty (staking out a position on some sort of lifestyle issue).

There's no way that you can form a tally from the sum total of a person's entire lineage in order to equalize them according to their ancestors struggles. Attempts to do this seem mostly to act as a laundering scheme for financial privilege. Now all someone from a wealthy family needs to do to justify their admission to elite institutions is to find some great great grandparent who plausibly suffered a systemic injustice.

I see the good intentions here, but I get the impression that well meaning rule oriented people are being used to further the very injustices they mean to solve.